Meeting the first condition of poverty alleviation
Syed Fattahul Alim | Wednesday, 27 August 2008
The country took its first donor-driven poverty reduction strategy in 2003. Though implementation of the poverty reduction targets in line with the design of the strategy paper remained a far cry, the interim government, which inherited the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), did extend the span of the paper for another year until April 30, 2007. Whatever the achievements of the first strategy paper were, the government has to continue the ritual as desired by the donor community. So did start the preparations for the second version of the poverty-reduction strategy on July 26, 2007. Now the second version of the PRSP, with the slogan: Moving Ahead, is poised for its fresh journey. It is worthwhile to note that the slogan for the previous document of the PRSP, too, was quite a mouthful as it pledged to reduce poverty with the slogan, "Unlock the Potential."
The government's, or for that matter, the donor community's concern for reduction of poverty from the country has well been reflected through their various efforts at ridding the country of the scourge of poverty. But the new approach to address the issue marked a departure from the past in that the multilateral donors under the auspices of the UN launched their new millennium mission of reducing global poverty. And the country-specific programme of reducing poverty through what is called the PRSP is only part of the global millennium mission.
In fact, it was a grandiose scheme to rid the world of poverty in phases within a definite time frame. In the first phase, the global poverty was to be cut by half within 2015.
If truth be told, the fight against poverty and the donor community's concern for it is a rather prolonged one. Before the millennium approach to poverty alleviation, the country had witnessed no end of programmes to rid society of this curse. Meanwhile, a large poverty reduction industry has sprung up in the country under the various government departments as well as at the private level through the Non-Government Organisations (NGOs). Moreover, donor funds for poverty research are also abundantly available. All these programmes and researches had been well under way, when the UN-dictated poverty reduction strategy in question was undertaken. So, one can reasonably hope that poverty should have no scope for survival with such a pronged attack on it from various fronts. Unfortunately, poverty is still reigning rather comfortably here as elsewhere in the world. And meanwhile, with the most advanced economies led by the USA flirting with recession and the price of oil breaking all previous records in its upward mobility combined with ever-soaring prices of essential commodities on a global scale, the thrust on poverty alleviation programmes are understandably at low ebb. That is because, the main contributors to the UN system and the World Bank are themselves in the midst of a financial crisis caused by the factors mentioned before.
Bangladesh, which is proverbially a hazard-prone-the hazards stemming from all kind of factors ranging from the political to the natural, is also not unaffected by these factors of international origin. One needs not go at length on these issues to explain why the first phase of the PRSP could not make a significant headway in achieving its targets.
What then is the status of the second version of this poverty reduction strategy paper? What do the people, for whom all these grand arrangements are being made, think of this programme?
In fact, the poor, for whom all these grandiose schemes are being placed from time to time, are not at all aware of these efforts for the improvement of their lot. Because, they are already submerged under a deluge of anti-poverty programmes and the lending activities carried out by the micro-credit delivery agencies. So, it is understandably hard for them to tell one poverty alleviation programme from the other as all these have overlapped one another creating a big mess. However, the general perception of the thing might be that the more the number of anti-poverty programmes in practice, the better the prospect of eliminating country from the country. Regrettably though, for all practical purposes, the ever-growing slum population, the rising number of homeless people making the pavements of the city their temporary homes under the open sky fly in the face of all these anti-poverty programmes.
Critics and even authors of the second phase of the poverty reduction strategy paper do not hold the entire exercise in a positive light. A critic among the economists, Anu Muhammad, for example, doubts if any poverty reduction targets was at all achieved in the first phase of the famed PRSP. So, he has no reason to have any high opinion about the second phase of the PRSP, either, as he said, "The new document, too, will not be of much benefit to the poor, despite the common slogan of pro-poor economic growth."
The government, too, has hardly any data on the reality on the ground, particularly, after the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of 2005. In absence of a concerted action from the government and the NGOs to reduce poverty, there is also no reason to think that poverty has come down in the country on its own. Even those involved in the preparation of the PRSP have acknowledged the failures of the first phase of the poverty reduction strategy paper. The main challenge before them in the second phase of the strategy paper would naturally be to overcome these endemic failures in implementation. Where do the hurdles to implementation lie? Since the main implementing agency of the poverty reduction practice at issue is the government, the difficulties, as you would expect, are deeply entrenched in its own machinery, the bureaucracy. These include problems related to government regulations, laws, poor institutional mechanism, and so on.
To be frank, from the very beginning, the poverty alleviation programmes lacked the basic criteria of their success. For all of them proved to be richer in words than in action and bureaucracy-driven. Though all of them were all for participation of the would-be beneficiaries in the programme, it never happened in real practice. In fact, the very mechanism to take the programmes at the people's door step was absent in all these efforts. And how can a lethargic bureaucracy hope to implement the targets of the poverty alleviation strategy paper, if they themselves and their self-aggrandising political masters in the past were quite devoid of the will to reduce poverty from society?
So, the campaigns launched from time to time to drive away poverty from the country have always remained a pipe dream for either the donor community or for the well-meaning people in the government who conceived those programmes in the first place.
Interestingly though, the authors of the new strategy paper has estimated an amount of Tk. 2540 billion to achieve the targets during the three years of its implementation. They have, however, projected a resource gap of Tk 610 billion. Compared to the estimated cost of the programme, the projected resource gap is more than 25 per cent. Now let us not be critical of the huge resource gap, if only for the sake of giving it another opportunity to prove itself. But with the records of success of the first PRSP before us, one really cannot take heart despite these impressive figures of availability or non-availability of resources.
Now let us forget about the new or the old PRSPs for the time being. What if all those money could be invested, preferably, in the countryside to build industries. small, medium or even larger ones?
Unfortunately, there is a big problem in the entire perception of poverty alleviation, for poverty is not a separate issue of development or the lack of it. . The highly advanced economies of the Western world did never solve their own poverty issue basing on any poverty diagnostics, as they are trying to do it now for the least developed countries of the world. Neither has the newly successful East Asia been doing this. The first condition to be met in this regard is industrialisation. Why does not the donor community or the UN or the World Bank make a grandiose plan to provide necessary incentives to the prospective overseas investors so that they might invest, for example, in Bangladesh in a big way? Why don't they channel enough funds in the public sector for investment in industrial development?
If truth be told, no effort at poverty alleviation would ever succeed, unless its first condition is fulfilled.
The government's, or for that matter, the donor community's concern for reduction of poverty from the country has well been reflected through their various efforts at ridding the country of the scourge of poverty. But the new approach to address the issue marked a departure from the past in that the multilateral donors under the auspices of the UN launched their new millennium mission of reducing global poverty. And the country-specific programme of reducing poverty through what is called the PRSP is only part of the global millennium mission.
In fact, it was a grandiose scheme to rid the world of poverty in phases within a definite time frame. In the first phase, the global poverty was to be cut by half within 2015.
If truth be told, the fight against poverty and the donor community's concern for it is a rather prolonged one. Before the millennium approach to poverty alleviation, the country had witnessed no end of programmes to rid society of this curse. Meanwhile, a large poverty reduction industry has sprung up in the country under the various government departments as well as at the private level through the Non-Government Organisations (NGOs). Moreover, donor funds for poverty research are also abundantly available. All these programmes and researches had been well under way, when the UN-dictated poverty reduction strategy in question was undertaken. So, one can reasonably hope that poverty should have no scope for survival with such a pronged attack on it from various fronts. Unfortunately, poverty is still reigning rather comfortably here as elsewhere in the world. And meanwhile, with the most advanced economies led by the USA flirting with recession and the price of oil breaking all previous records in its upward mobility combined with ever-soaring prices of essential commodities on a global scale, the thrust on poverty alleviation programmes are understandably at low ebb. That is because, the main contributors to the UN system and the World Bank are themselves in the midst of a financial crisis caused by the factors mentioned before.
Bangladesh, which is proverbially a hazard-prone-the hazards stemming from all kind of factors ranging from the political to the natural, is also not unaffected by these factors of international origin. One needs not go at length on these issues to explain why the first phase of the PRSP could not make a significant headway in achieving its targets.
What then is the status of the second version of this poverty reduction strategy paper? What do the people, for whom all these grand arrangements are being made, think of this programme?
In fact, the poor, for whom all these grandiose schemes are being placed from time to time, are not at all aware of these efforts for the improvement of their lot. Because, they are already submerged under a deluge of anti-poverty programmes and the lending activities carried out by the micro-credit delivery agencies. So, it is understandably hard for them to tell one poverty alleviation programme from the other as all these have overlapped one another creating a big mess. However, the general perception of the thing might be that the more the number of anti-poverty programmes in practice, the better the prospect of eliminating country from the country. Regrettably though, for all practical purposes, the ever-growing slum population, the rising number of homeless people making the pavements of the city their temporary homes under the open sky fly in the face of all these anti-poverty programmes.
Critics and even authors of the second phase of the poverty reduction strategy paper do not hold the entire exercise in a positive light. A critic among the economists, Anu Muhammad, for example, doubts if any poverty reduction targets was at all achieved in the first phase of the famed PRSP. So, he has no reason to have any high opinion about the second phase of the PRSP, either, as he said, "The new document, too, will not be of much benefit to the poor, despite the common slogan of pro-poor economic growth."
The government, too, has hardly any data on the reality on the ground, particularly, after the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of 2005. In absence of a concerted action from the government and the NGOs to reduce poverty, there is also no reason to think that poverty has come down in the country on its own. Even those involved in the preparation of the PRSP have acknowledged the failures of the first phase of the poverty reduction strategy paper. The main challenge before them in the second phase of the strategy paper would naturally be to overcome these endemic failures in implementation. Where do the hurdles to implementation lie? Since the main implementing agency of the poverty reduction practice at issue is the government, the difficulties, as you would expect, are deeply entrenched in its own machinery, the bureaucracy. These include problems related to government regulations, laws, poor institutional mechanism, and so on.
To be frank, from the very beginning, the poverty alleviation programmes lacked the basic criteria of their success. For all of them proved to be richer in words than in action and bureaucracy-driven. Though all of them were all for participation of the would-be beneficiaries in the programme, it never happened in real practice. In fact, the very mechanism to take the programmes at the people's door step was absent in all these efforts. And how can a lethargic bureaucracy hope to implement the targets of the poverty alleviation strategy paper, if they themselves and their self-aggrandising political masters in the past were quite devoid of the will to reduce poverty from society?
So, the campaigns launched from time to time to drive away poverty from the country have always remained a pipe dream for either the donor community or for the well-meaning people in the government who conceived those programmes in the first place.
Interestingly though, the authors of the new strategy paper has estimated an amount of Tk. 2540 billion to achieve the targets during the three years of its implementation. They have, however, projected a resource gap of Tk 610 billion. Compared to the estimated cost of the programme, the projected resource gap is more than 25 per cent. Now let us not be critical of the huge resource gap, if only for the sake of giving it another opportunity to prove itself. But with the records of success of the first PRSP before us, one really cannot take heart despite these impressive figures of availability or non-availability of resources.
Now let us forget about the new or the old PRSPs for the time being. What if all those money could be invested, preferably, in the countryside to build industries. small, medium or even larger ones?
Unfortunately, there is a big problem in the entire perception of poverty alleviation, for poverty is not a separate issue of development or the lack of it. . The highly advanced economies of the Western world did never solve their own poverty issue basing on any poverty diagnostics, as they are trying to do it now for the least developed countries of the world. Neither has the newly successful East Asia been doing this. The first condition to be met in this regard is industrialisation. Why does not the donor community or the UN or the World Bank make a grandiose plan to provide necessary incentives to the prospective overseas investors so that they might invest, for example, in Bangladesh in a big way? Why don't they channel enough funds in the public sector for investment in industrial development?
If truth be told, no effort at poverty alleviation would ever succeed, unless its first condition is fulfilled.